Grams

Tempogram


What I find interesting about these tempograms, is that all songs have highlighted tempi above the 200 bpm, which is pretty high. By manually (https://www.justinguitar.com/tap-tempo-bpm-tool) checking the bpm of the songs, i found that the highlighted tempo is the double time of most songs. (there is only one song because my laptop couldn’t handle knitting 6… I’ll try and find a solution)

Histogram of tempi


Here are the histograms of tempo for each decade. I used hist instead of ggplot geom_histogram, because I couldn’t get the latter to work… I want to get the top 20 tracks of each decade, make a graph with tempo on the y axis and track number on the x axis, but I can’t get label=track.name to work.

Can we find something by looking at the most populair keys of the last 60 years?


The keys are set in pitch classes, so 0=C, 1=C#/Db, 2=D etc

As you can see, the most popular key in all decades is C. The least popular key overall seems to be D. Something I don’t understand is that the key only seems to go up till A#. I can’t find the B…

### Having a deeper look at the most positive tunes of each decade (playlist) and see if a chordogram can tell us more

key_mode n
G major 13
C major 12
D major 12
E major 11
B minor 8

I seems as if the distinctness between notes in music has gotten bigger through the years? I have the same cluttered problem here as a do with the ceptrograms…

Having a deeper look at the most positive tunes of each decade (playlist) and see if a cepstrogram can tell us more


Okay so I managed to get the grams next to each other, but they’re very cluttered… Does someone have a solution for this? I’ve tried random stuff with nrow and ncol but it didn’t help.

Introduction

The Happiest of the Decades

Throughout the decades we have seen happier and sadder times. Each decade has been marked by the tough times and the good times, as are we. Music has long been a means of expression for human beings, in both listening as playing. So maybe music can tell us more about the emotions of a decade’s zeitgeist, which brings me to my question; which decade was the happiest, and what can the popular music released in that decade tell us about the collective happiness?

Overview

Emotional Stats


These graphs show the valence (x axis) and the [popularity (y axis) of Spotify’s own “All Out” playlists of each decade from the 60s up till the 10s. The size of the dots indicates the danceability and the colour indicates the mode (major/minor) of the song, 1 for major, 0 for minor.

Conclusions I do not have yet

  • in modern music more minor
  • 00s more danceable?